Publication Date:
2004-11-16
Description:
Genomic instability is a driving force in tumor development that can be achieved by a variety of mechanisms, such as defective chromosome segregation or inactivation of the DNA mismatch repair pathway. Although B-cell lymphomas are associated with chromosomal translocations deregulating oncogene expression, a mechanism for genome-wide instability during lymphomagenesis has long not been described. We have reported that the somatic hypermutation process (SHM), which normally targets the immunoglobulin variable region (IgV) and BCL6 genes in germinal center (GC) B-cells, functions aberrantly in 〉50% of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), the most common type of B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma (Pasqualucci et al., Nature412:341, 2001). As a consequence, multiple somatic mutations are introduced into the 5′ region of genes that do not represent physiologic SHM targets, including known proto-oncogenes such as PIM1, PAX5, RhoH/TTF and cMYC. To further define the extent of this phenomenon, termed aberrant somatic hypermutation (ASHM), and to identify additional hypermutated loci of possible pathogenetic significance in DLBCL, we screened 113 genes for the presence of mutations affecting their 5′ sequences (≥1.3 Kb from the transcription start site, the target region for SHM) in 10 DLBCL cell lines. Fifteen genes (13.3%) were found to harbor a significant number of mutations (p
Print ISSN:
0006-4971
Electronic ISSN:
1528-0020
Topics:
Biology
,
Medicine
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